Dead or Alive Read online

  “He’s on his way,” Oleksei said. “I checked before I came. Busy night, I guess.”

  Rosikhina leaned over and snagged the gun’s trigger guard with his index finger and lifted it from the seat. “Nine millimeter.” He ejected the magazine and cycled back the slide. A bullet tumbled out of the chamber and clinked onto the floor.

  “Well, he was ready for something. Any missing?”

  Rosikhina shook his head and sniffed the barrel. “Happened too fast, I suspect. Recently cleaned. Well, I’ll be damned. . . . Look, of all things, Gennady, the serial number’s been erased.”

  “Will miracles never cease?”

  Bad guys often acid-erased the serial numbers on murder weapons but rarely re-inscribed them. If that was the case here, the Makarov’s number might actually lead somewhere. Cockeyed optimism.

  And probably misplaced, Rosikhina reminded himself.

  As often happened in homicide cases, whether in the West or in Moscow, Lieutenant Rosikhina and Oleksei would learn little either from those present in the restaurant at the time of the murder or from the canvass of the surrounding neighborhood. The Chechnyan community was tight-knit, distrusting of the police, and deeply afraid of the Obshina. And with good reason. Its brutality knew few bounds. A witness would pay not only with his own life but with those of his family as well, a spectacle which he’d likely be forced to watch before he, too, was killed. The prospect of seeing one’s children carved up with a hacksaw tended to close loose lips. Even so, Rosikhina had little choice but to go through the motions of taking statements, however unproductive, and tracking down leads, however insubstantial.

  They would diligently work the murder, but in the end what few small leads they had would evaporate and they’d be forced to set the case aside. With this thought, Rosikhina looked sadly at the victim. “Sorry, my friend.”

  17

  IT WAS A FUNNY THING, Jack Ryan Jr. thought, that there’d been no congratulatory replies to the birth announcement. Not one. He had everything cross-filed on his computer, all of it in the terabytes of RAM on The Campus’s monstrous server, and he called up the most recent documents, making a written note of initiator and recipient, but those were always nothing more than an alphanumeric handle that might or might not have a relationship to their real names. Jack extended his search of past e-mails to six months prior and ran a quick spreadsheet. Sure enough, the traffic had been steady, rarely varying more than five percent from month to month. And now, within days of the birth announcement, a precipitous drop. In fact, aside from a few routine messages that had probably been sent before the announcement and had been stuck in cyberspace, there were no e-mails. The Emir and his URC—the Umayyad Revolutionary Council—had in essence gone radio-silent, and that thought gave Jack a chill. There were three options: Either they’d switched communication protocols as a general security measure, or they’d somehow figured out someone was reading their mail, or this was an OpSec change, a zipping of the electronic lips prior to a high-level operation. The first two options were possible but unlikely. The URC had changed its procedures little in the last nine months, and The Campus had been careful not to tip its hand. So option three. There was precedent, of course. Just before 9/11, Al-Qaeda standard electronic chatter level dropped like a stone; so, too, with the Japanese before Pearl Harbor. Part of Jack wanted his hypothesis to be proven out; another part hoped to hell he was wrong.

  How, then, would the Emir get his messages out? Couriers were the most secure method, if not the quickest: Write up the messages, burn the disk, and have someone take it for a handoff rendezvous. With modern air travel, a man could get from Chicago to Calcutta in less than a day, so long as he didn’t mind airline food. Hell, international air travel was designed with that idea in mind, wasn’t it? It might have been designed with the “black” community in mind, not just the sales force of Frederick’s of Hollywood or Dow Chemical.

  Chicago to Calcutta. What if the Emir was in Chicago, or New York, or Miami? What was to stop him from living there? Not a goddamned thing. The CIA and everyone else assumed he was somewhere in the Stans—why? Because that was the last place they’d known him to be. Not because of any evidence that would place him anywhere. And there was a good half of the United States government’s Special Forces in Pakistan and Afghanistan beating the bushes and looking into every hole in the rocks, asking endless questions, tossing money around, looking for the one man—or woman—who might know his face and might know where he might be. And still nothing. What were the odds of that? Jack wondered.

  A man like the Emir could never feel secure enough, not with every intelligence agency in the world looking for him—even dedicated, patriotic intelligence officers could look at the public reward America had placed on his head and think of a nice house on the Riviera and a comfortable retirement, just for one phone call and a little bit of information. . . .

  The Emir would know all of that. He’d limit the number of people who knew his location. He’d limit that number to people whom he could absolutely trust, and he’d take good care of them. The best of care. Money, comfort, such luxuries as circumstances permitted. He’d reinforce their desire to earn his trust. He’d reinforce their faith in Allah and in himself, be solicitous as hell to them. But he would also maintain his aura of command, because the source of that authority was always on a man-to-man basis, as with all the really important things in life, a thing of the mind.

  So what would it take for the Emir to relocate beyond Pakistan and Afghanistan? How does one go about moving the most wanted man on the face of the earth?

  The CIA’s master file on the Emir had mediocre photos, some of them raw and some digitally enhanced, all of which had been distributed to virtually every intelligence and police agency in the world. Same with the general public. If Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie can’t go out to Sunday brunch without being mobbed, the Emir would certainly find it difficult to travel beyond his regular stomping grounds.

  The Emir couldn’t change his height, though it was technically possible, but it involved major and somewhat painful surgery, followed by a lengthy recovery period, which would necessitate being immobile for several weeks—bad joss for a guy on the run. He could change his face, his skin color, his hair. He could wear colored contact lenses to change his eye color and maybe improve his eyesight, which, the file said, was about average. He walked erectly, not slumped over, and the talk about how he suffered from Marfan syndrome had been shot down by a doc at Johns Hopkins who was an expert in the disorder, rather to Langley’s surprise, as that had become gospel to the intelligence community. So he did not need a dialysis machine in constant proximity.

  Wait a second, Jack. The intel community had been assuming a lot about the Emir. They’d gotten, what, one opinion on the Marfan angle? Was that enough to discount the theory? As far as Jack could tell, no one had ever laid hands on someone close enough to the Emir to know one way or another. Something to think about.

  “Hey, Jack,” said a familiar voice. He turned to see Dominic and Brian standing in the doorway.

  “Hey, guys, come on in. What’s happening?”

  Each brother took a chair. Dominic said, “Reading a computer all morning gives me a headache, so I came up to harass you. Whatcha reading? Application to the Treasury Department?”

  It took a moment for Jack to get it. Treasury oversaw the Secret Service. These kind of jokes had been coming since the Georgetown thing. While the press was giving the incident heavy coverage, his name had so far remained out of it, which suited him just fine. Hendley knew the whole story, of course, which didn’t bother Jack at all. More ammunition when it came to pitch his boss.

  “Smart-ass,” Jack shot back.

  “They know anything about the mutt?” Brian asked.

  “Not that I’ve heard. The press is saying no accomplices, but in something like this they only get what the Secret Service wants them to get.” In a town where leaks were more the rule than the exception, the Secret Se
rvice knew how to run a tight ship. Jack changed the subject. “You heard about the Marfan theory, right? About the Emir?”

  “Yeah, I think so,” Dominic replied. “Didn’t pan out, right?”

  Jack shrugged. “Trying to think outside the box. His location, for example: My gut tells me he’s not in Afghanistan, but we’ve never thought beyond there or Pakistan. What if we should be? He’s got all kinds of money, and money buys you a lot of flexibility.”

  Brian shrugged. “Still, kinda hard to imagine a guy like that getting even fifty miles away from his bolt-hole without being spotted.”

  “Assumptions and intel analysis are dangerous bedfellows,” Jack observed.

  “True. If he’s moved on, I bet that fucker’s laughing his ass off watching everybody hump those mountains looking for him. How would he do it, though? Sure as hell couldn’t just walk into the Islamabad airport and ask for a ticket.”

  Dominic said, “Money can buy you a lot of knowledge, too.”

  “What do you mean?” Jack asked.

  “There’s an expert for every problem, Jack. The trick is knowing where to look.”

  The day passed quickly. At five, Jack poked his head into Dominic’s office. Brian was sitting in the chair across from his brother’s desk. “Hey, guys,” Jack called.

  “Yo,” Brian responded. “How’s the computer maven?”

  “Chipping away.”

  “What’s for dinner?” Dominic wondered.

  “Open for ideas.”

  “His love life must be like mine,” Brian muttered.

  “Found a new place in Baltimore. Wanna give it a try?”

  “Sure.” What the hell, Jack thought. Eating alone was never fun.

  The three-car convoy headed north on U.S. 29, then turned east on U.S. 40 for the trip into Baltimore’s Little Italy—nearly every American city has one—off Eastern Avenue. The trip was almost identical to Jack’s normal drive home, a few blocks from the baseball stadium at Camden Yards. But that season had ended, again without a trip into the playoffs.

  Baltimore’s Little Italy is a rabbit warren of narrow streets and few parking lots, and for Jack, parking his Hummer was not unlike bringing an ocean liner alongside. But in due course he found a spot in a small parking lot and then walked the two blocks to the restaurant on High Street, which specialized in Northern Italian food. On walking in, he saw that his cousins were camped out in a corner booth, with nobody else close by.

  “How’s the food here?” he asked, taking a seat.

  “The head chef is as good as our grandfather, and that’s high praise, Jack. The veal is really first-class. They say he buys it himself every day at Lexington Market.”

  “Must be tough, being a cow,” Jack observed, scanning the menu.

  “Never asked,” Brian noted. “Never heard any complaints, though.”

  “Talk to my sister. She’s turning into a vegan, except for the shoes.” Jack chuckled. “How’s the wine list?”

  “Ordered,” the Marine responded. “Lacrima Christi del Vesuvio. I discovered it in Naples on a Med Cruise. The Tears of Christ from Vesuvius. Took a trip to Pompeii, and the guide said they’ve been growing wine grapes there for about two thousand years, and I assumed they have it pretty well figured out. If you don’t like it, I’ll drink it all,” Brian promised.

  “Brian knows his wine, Jack,” Dominic said.

  “You say it like you’re surprised,” Brian shot back. “I’m not your typical jarhead, you know.”

  “I stand corrected.”

  The bottle came a minute later. The waiter opened it with a flourish.

  “Where do you eat in Naples?”

  “My boy, you have to work real hard to find a bad restaurant in Italy,” Dominic told him. “The stuff you buy on the street is as good as most sit-down restaurants over here. But this place is seriously okay. He’s a paisano.”

  Brian tuned in: “In Naples, there’s a place on the waterfront called La Bersagliera, about a mile from the big fortress. Now, I’ll risk a fistfight and say that’s the best restaurant in the entire world.”

  “No. Rome, Alfonso Ricci’s, ’bout half a mile east of Vatican City,” Dominic pronounced.

  “Guess I’ll take your word for it.”

  The food came, along with more wine, and the conversation turned to women. All three dated, but casually. The Carusos joked that they were looking for the perfect Italian girl; for Jack’s part, he was looking for a girl he could “bring home to Mom.”

  “So what’re you saying, cuz?” Brian asked. “You don’t like ’em a little slutty?”

  “In the bedroom, hell, yes,”Jack replied.“But out in public ... Not a big fan of halter tops and giant tramp stamps.”

  Dominic chuckled at this. “Brian, what was the name of that girl, you know the one, the stripper with the tattoo?”

  “Ah, shit ...”

  Dominic was still laughing. He turned to Jack and said, half conspiratorially, “She had this tattoo just below her belly button: a downward arrow with the words Slippery When Wet. Problem was, she spelled slippery with one p.”

  Jack burst out laughing. “What was her name?”

  Brian shook his head. “No way.”

  “Tell him,” Dominic said.

  “Come on,” Jack prodded.

  “Candy.”

  More laughter. “Spelled with a y or an ie?” Jack asked.

  “Neither. Two e’s. Okay, okay, so she wasn’t the brightest bulb. We weren’t exactly on the marriage track. What about you, Jack? What’s your taste? Jessica Alba, maybe? Scarlett Johansson?”

  “Charlize Theron.”

  “Good choice,” Dominic observed.

  From a nearby stool at the bar they heard, “I’d go for Holly Madison. Great boobs.”

  The three of them turned to see a woman smiling at them. She was a redhead, tall, with green eyes and a wide smile. “Just my two cents,” she added.

  “The woman has a point,” Dominic observed. “Then again, if we’re talking about intellect ...”

  “Intellect?” the woman replied. “I thought we were talking about sex. If you’re going to bring brainpower into it, then I’d have to go with . . . Paris Hilton.”

  There were a few moments of silence before the woman’s deadpan expression showed a hint of a smile. Jack, Dominic, and Brian burst out lauging. The Marine said, “I suppose now would be the time to ask if you want to join us.”

  “Love to.”

  She picked up her freshly refilled glass of wine and moved to their table, taking a seat beside Dominic. “I’m Wendy,” she said. “Spelled with a y on the end,” she added. “Sorry, I couldn’t help eavesdropping.” She said to Dominic, “So we know Jack likes Charlize and Brian goes for dyslexic strippers—”

  “That hurts,” Brian said.

  “—but what about you?”

  “You want my real answer?”

  “Of course.”

  “It’s going to sound like a line.”

  “Try me.”

  “I prefer redheads.”

  Jack groaned. “So smooth.”

  Wendy studied Dominic’s face for moment. “He’s telling the truth, I think.”

  “He is,” Brian confirmed. “He’s still got a poster of Lucille Ball in his room.”

  General laughter.

  “Bullshit, bro.” To Wendy: “You meeting someone?”

  “I was. A girlfriend. She texted me, said she couldn’t make it.”

  The four of them ate dinner, shared more wine, and talked until nearly eleven, when Jack announced he was going home. Brian, having seen the same signs his cousin had, bowed out as well, and soon Dominic and Wendy were alone. They chatted for a few more minutes before she said, “So ...”

  The opening was there, and Dominic took it. “You wanna get out of here?”

  Wendy smiled at him. “My place is a couple blocks from here.”

  They were kissing before the elevator doors closed, parted briefly when the car re
ached her floor, then moved together to her door, then inside, where the clothes started coming off. Once in the bedroom, Wendy wriggled the rest of the way out of her dress, revealing a lacy black bra and matching panties. She sat down on the bed before Dominic, grabbed the end of his belt, whipped it free, then lay back on the bed. “Your turn.” A lock of red hair had fallen over one of Wendy’s eyes.

  “Wow,” Dominic breathed.

  “I’ll take that as a compliment,” she replied with a giggle.

  Dominic took off his pants and got onto the bed. They kissed for thirty seconds before Wendy pulled away. She rolled over and opened her nightstand drawer. “A little something to set the mood,” she said, looking back at him, then rolled over with a tiny rectangular mirror and a thumb-sized glass vial.

  “What’s that?” Dominic asked.

  “It’ll make it better,” Wendy said.

  Ah, shit, Dominic thought. She saw his expression change and said, “What?”

  “This isn’t going to work.”

  “Why, what’s the matter? It’s just a little coke.”

  Dominic got up, retrieved his pants, and slipped them on.

  “You’re going?” Wendy said, sitting up.

  “Yep.”

  “You’re kidding me? Just because of—”

  “Yep.”

  “God, what’s your problem?”

  Dominic didn’t answer. He grabbed his shirt from the floor and slipped it on. He headed for the door.

  “You’re an asshole,” Wendy said.

  Dominic stopped and turned around. He fished his wallet from his pants and flipped it open to reveal his FBI badge.

  “Oh, shit,” Wendy whispered. “I didn’t ... Are you going to—”

  “No. This is your lucky day.”

  He walked out.

  Tariq Himsi was contemplating the power of money. And the vagaries of choice. Finding the Emir a companion, even for a fleeting assignation, was a delicate proposition. His tastes were specific; his security paramount. Fortunately, the whores here were plentiful, easy to find on the street, and, as it turned out, quite accustomed to unusual requests, such as being driven to an undisclosed location in a vehicle with blacked-out windows. His earlier surveillance had shown that while morally corrupt, these women were far from stupid: They patrolled their corners in twos and threes, and whenever one of their cohorts got into a car, one of the others would take down the license plate number. A quick trip to one of the local airport’s off-property park-and-ride lots had solved this problem. License plates were easy to install and even easier to dispose of. Almost as easy as disguising his appearance with thick black glasses and a baseball cap.